1.5 El arsénico en el medio ambiente
1.5.4 Presencia del arsénico en la flora y la fauna
Australian National University
Abstract
This paper presents a reconstruction of Proto-Nicobarese phonology comprising a segmental inventory and syllable structure. Nicobarese is a branch of Austroasiatic languages located on an island chain in the Andaman sea. Being the only branch of the phylum located on islands, and on a well-known trade route, Nicobarese provides an important point of comparison with other AA languages in India and Mainland South-East Asia. While much work still needs to be done, the current effort brings together relevant known work on these languages.1
Keywords: Nicobarese, Proto-Nicobarese, phonology, reconstruction ISO 639-3 codes: caq, crv, tef, ncb, nik, sii
1 Introduction
The Nicobarese languages form a small branch of the Austroasiatic2 phylum, with just a few thousand
speakers on an island chain in the Andaman Sea. The 2011 India census lists a total population for the islands at 36,842 (down from 42,068 in the 2001 census due to the 2004 tsunami) with about 30% of that population being from the mainland such as government staff and plantation workers (including speakers of Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Santali). Since the 1960s in particular, the islands have been off limits to outsiders, as a consequence of the attitude of the government of India. Historically the islands lie on the sea route between India and the Far East, and it is reported that the islands were conquered by the Indian Chola dynasty in the eleventh century (Murthy 2005:21). The earliest mention of the Nicobars is apparently in Ptolemy’s atlas circa 150 A.D.
De Röepstroff (1875) describes the islanders a century and a half ago having extensive trade relations with the outside world and many being familiar with outside languages. He remarks of the Nicobarese:
They are great linguists. You may, to a certain extent, tell hie history of the islands as far as it has been connected with trade through the languages spoken. The oldest men yet speak the corrupted Portuguese that still lingers in the East. Middle-aged men speak very often a little bad sailor-English; the young men, especially South and East, speak Burmese; the boys a little Hindistani: all talk Malay and their own language. At Car Nicobar they talk English pretty well.
(De Röepstroff 1875:14)
We see the linguistic impact of this history of contact in many loan words noted in the available dictionaries/lexicons. Some examples from Man’s (1889) dictionary of Nancowry: lēbare ‘book’, arōe ‘rice’, shapēo ‘hat’ < Portuguese, kapo ‘cattle’, lapu ‘gourd’, koching ‘cat’ < Malay. It is clear that loans have reached well into the cultural vocabulary, and in this paper the approach taken endeavours to exclude loan words as much as possible in order to reflect the native phonology and lexicon.
The most extensive sources available for Nicobarese are the colonial era dictionaries and grammars that deal with just two (Car and Nancowry) of the six languages conventionally distinguished in the literature.
1 I would like to thank individuals who assisted with comments and feedback in the preparation of this draft: Jessica Johnson, Ryan Gehrmann, Mathias Jenny, and the remarks of two annonymous reviewers who were harsh but helpful in their contributions. Also I acknowledge with gratitude financial support I received from the Australian Research Council under Future Fellowship award FT120100241, and assistance from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Jena), which supported work on this project
The languages are mostly named after the islands on which they are spoken. Those languages, and the best available resources are listed here:
19) Car:3 Whitehead (1925) dictionary with 6705 entries extracted, Das (1977) lexicon of which 2282
items are extracted, Critchfield-Brain (1963) 87 page typescript lexicon in close transcription. 20) Chowra: Man (1889) index provides approx. 380 words.
21) Teresa and Bompoka: Man (1889) index provides approx. 380 words.
22) Central (Nancowry/Müot,4 Camorta, Trinkat, Katchall): Man (1889) dictionary of Nancowry 5961
entries extracted, Radhakrishnan (1981) study of Nancowry morphology lists 778 lexical root and their derivatives.
23) Southern (Great and Little Nicobar, Pulo Milo, Kondull): Man (1889) index provides approx. 380 words.
24) Shompen (interior of Great Nicobar Island): Man (1889) index provides approx. 380 words, Chattopadhyay & Mukhopadhyay (2003) list approx. 700 words, Gnanasundaram & Rangantha (1995) list some 70 words.
Of the above the Car and Nancowry sources are the most extensive and reliable, so the analyses and reconstruction presented in this paper are based primarily on just those two languages. This is a fundamental limitation that may never be overcome.
In Sidwell (2015) I presented a preliminary statistical analysis which suggests that the Nicobarese lects of the Central island group (Nancowry, Katcall, Camorta, Kondul, Pulo Milo, Teressa) form a coherent dialect grouping that coordinates with Car, forming a tree with two main branches. Since then I prepared a more extensive dataset for phylogenetic analysis, incorporating data from the comparative word lists in the appendices to Man (1889).5 The results of that work are reported separately (a paper is in preparation)
support the provisional classification followed here which places the Nicobarese lects into three primary groups, consistent with the geographical distribution of the islands as seen in the Wurm & Hattori map reproduced below. This scheme is diagrammed as follows:
Figure: Nicobarese varieties
The above configuration supersedes the study by Blench and Sidwell (2011), which hypothesized that Shompen may be more closely related to Aslian or otherwise represent a branch intermediate between Nicobarese and Aslian. An unpublished statistical analysis6 suggests that the internal diversification of
Nicobarese began around 2,200 years BP, based on calibrations with Austroasiatic languages with well known histories, Khmer and Mon, plus inferences regarding the internal diversification of Bahnaric and Vietic.7 It is also possible that this estimate is actually too old; accelerated lexical change due to word
3 These resources are largely extracted and available online, the Whitehead, Das and Man data at: http://sealang.net/monkhmer and the Braine and Radhakrishnan data at
http://sites.google.com/view/paulsidwell/nicobarese-languages-project.
4 Müot is preferred in place of Nancowry by V.R. Rajasingh (CIIL Mysore) who has been relatively active in Nicobarese research of late. The term Central Nicobarese also enjoys use in the literature.
5 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14pLIzYnj4Vvoscv4Zy7ACmQVQrNgDFsqeBAUZwlnF0c/edit#gid=0 6 Phylogenetic analyses presented at the workshop “Integrating inferences about our past” June 22-23 2015, Max
Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Jena, Germany) offering a Maximum Clade Credibility Tree of the CTMC + Gamma Relaxed analysis - contact the author for further details.
7 Both Mon and Khmer have a history of writing that goes back to the middle of the first Millennium CE, and reasonable assumptions about the diversification of Bahnaric and Vietnamese can be made based on the known
tabooing could indicate a significantly younger age. On the issue of the effect of tabooing on the lexicon, it is worth quoting Man at length:
The diversities of speech which have sprung into being among the four communities in question, are, moreover, no doubt in great measure ascribable to the operation of a superstitious custom, which here, as in various other remote regions, has effected constant changes in the language of the inhabitants; but in every instance of this kind such changes have been limited to the area of the particular community concerned. The practice referred to is based on a firm belief in an after-existence, and requires that the names of deceased relatives and friends shall be tabued for a certain lengthened period-generally about one generation-for fear of summoning or offending the ghost of the person so named. Therefore, as their system of personal nomenclature not only permits anyone to invent or adopt a name for him or herself, but also to take for this purpose any word in the language without consideration of its being in general use, it naturally follows that new words have to be instantly coined to take the place of those whose use is tabued in consequence of death, and thus many striking changes are introduced into the language in the course of each generation. (Man 1889:viii)
At the same time we are also pulled in the other direction by the possibility of undocumented diversity (recent or extinct) that could indicate a greater age, but we lack the resources to pursue the problem further in this paper. We can also hope that estimates of initial Austroasiatic settlement of the islands might also to be calibrated with archaeological evidence, something that is also still lacking.
Map: Nicobar languages from Wurm & Hattori (eds.) (1981/83) Language Atlas, (fragment from full map prepared by D. Bradley).
history of Indo-China and interaction with Chamic (Austronesian) settlement on the Vietnamese coast since the mid first first Millennium BCE. These facts allow for at least four calibration points in modeling the rate of change in the Austroasiatic family tree.
Taking the family tree above as our starting point, we note that the two lects for which substantial documentation is available—Car and Nancowry—fall across the two principal coordinating branches and we can hypothesize that features found to be held in common may be reconstructed to the pNicobarese level, thus our working method treats Car and Nancowry as criterion languages for the comparative reconstruction. Additionally, a root attested in only one of these lects, but having apparently cognates elsewhere in Austroasiatic, can be assumed to belong to proto-Nicobarese (abbreviated to pN in tables/formulas). Words only found in one Nicobarese sub-group and not otherwise attested in Austroasiatic are not reconstructed to proto-Nicobarese. It is acknowledged that we have no real sense of the extent to which Car and Nancowry have influenced each other after diverging from proto-Nicobarese, nor to what extent present or now extinct Nicobarese lects may have played a role in the history of the group, but we cannot base a study on unknowns. Consequently, the present reconstruction is a synthesis of bottom-up and top-down method. There is no reasonable alternative given the state of the available data and the obstacles to field work.
The Nicobarese data are generally difficult to work with. The large colonial era dictionaries are written in Roman orthographies8 that fail to mark some distinctions while also over-representing some meaningless
detail and variation. The languages are highly synthetic (in that regard they are more like Austronesian than Austroasiatic) and yet the published lexicons generally do not segment words morphologically, or segment everything simply into syllables such that the same roots may be represented differently in a variety of contexts. On top of this, the principle works that have attempted morphological analyses (Braine 1970, Radhakrishnan 1970, 1981) incorrectly assume that the lexical roots are generally monosyllabic and thus even their results have to be reassessed item by item by item for a full morphological analysis. In this short paper the focus is on lexical roots, and for identification of these we take advantage of wider Austroasiatic resources, which are now quite extensive, especially Short’s (2006) Mon-Khmer Comparative Dictionary and the data and search tools available online at http://sealang.net/monkhmer.
This study is not the first to investigate the historical phonology and lexicon of Nicobarese. I obtained from Norman Zide (Chicago) a typescript apparently from 1963 by N. Zide and D. P. S. Dwarikesh titled
The comparative phonology of proto-Nicobarese as derived from Kar Nicobarese and Central Nicobarese: Preliminary version. This is a 57 page draft that lays out phonological correspondences and a comparative
lexicon of of 191 items. That study does not present a reconstruction as such, but is helpful in terms of assisting the interpretation of the dictionary sources, and a proportion of the comparisons made are used here and acknowledged in the appendix. I also obtained from Zide another typescript, also apparently from 1963,
Initial Consonant in Proto-Munda-Nicobarese: some tentative correspondences. This 19 page draft lists
approximately 180 Munda-Nicobarese comparisons and tables the apparent segmental correspondences. It is not a reconstruction, but is a demonstration of the genetic relation between Munda and Nicobarese by showing regularities in the correspondences. My assessment is that many of the comparisons in this paper reproduce known etymologies from, e..g.: Pinnow (1959), Schmidt (1904), plus a large proportion that are speculative and not useful, and it is not relied upon in this study.9
Shorto (2006) lists some 317 Nicobarese comparisons in his comparative lexicon and many are taken directly from Radhakrishnan’s (1981) lexicon of Nancowry roots, and about two thirds of Shorto’s lexical comparisons have informed this study.10 The analyses presented in this study is based on the set of 266
lexical comparisons given in the appendix to this paper, along with the reconstructions I have based on them. The Appendix is organised to group etymologies according to the timbre of the stressed syllable nuclei; this maximises the utility of of the index since these correspondences are the most problematic and this organisational principle maximises the ease of comparing all the relevant data in context. However, since the contoid correspondences do not automatically group by this method, effort is taken to give relevant data examples in the text.
8 Note that orthographic forms are italicized throughout, they are not normalized to IPA because of the limitations associated with the orthographies.
9 Scans of both papers are available online at: http://sites.google.com/view/paulsidwell/nicobarese-languages-project. 10 I was gifted Shorto’s research collection by his family. and this included a copy of Radhakrishnan (1981) with
2
Phonological Profiles
2.1 Car
The phonological analysis of Car is based primarily on the works of Braine and Das:
3 An 85-page unpublished (1963)11 lexicon with explanatory notes, given to this writer by Norman Zide.
The notes include a guide to the approximate segmental values of Whitehead’s orthography. The lexicon includes about 1600 entries after overlapping entries are merged.
4 Braine’s 1970 thesis, which this writer had scanned and retyped
5 Das (1977) Car sketch (a work of mixed quality) which conveniently reproduces much of Whitehead’s lexical content in pseudo-IPA.
The (1925) dictionary by Whitehead is also an important work, but the lack of phonetic description, and its reliance on a Roman-based orthography, means that it must be used with particular care. It is also worth noting that Braine (1970), for theoretical reasons, strove to represent her data mostly in a strong morphophonemic notation – this approach is eschewed here in favor of achieving a broad segmental representation as far as practicable.
2.1.1 Car word/syllable structure
Car words are built on simple CV(C) syllables. Except for a modest number of onsets with a medial liquid or rhotic in unassimilated loans, onset clusters are not tolerated. Codas are optional, and open syllables tend to lengthen to preserve moraic weight (much like in other Austroasiatic languages). Various sources write syllables with zero onsets but a glottal stop is assumed in such cases. The inventory of coda segments is not quite as rich as the onsets, but on balance syllables are remarkably symmetrical by Austroasiatic standards.
The phonological word is built up of these simple syllables, minimally just one, but sequences up to four syllables are attested and longer words may be possible, given the richness of the morphological system and one’s definition of word. Words consist of lexical roots, which can be one- or two-syllable iambs (the rightmost syllable of lexical roots bears the primary word stress), plus various prefixes, infixes, and suffixes. It is also apparent that historical roots with onset clusters and/or sesquisyllables have often been restructured into disyllabic iambs. As a result of such changes, the full range of nuclei are only found in the main syllables of lexical roots, while unstressed syllables are restricted to having a small number of contrastive nuclei.
Descriptions of Car lack mention of syllable-level tones and/or phonation types. Braine (1970) does devote several pages to discussing pitch in the context the context of phrase and sentence level intonation, remarking:
As with English, Nicobarese may be readily read by a person knowing the language without any indication of pitch. Because of this marginal function of pitch, and because pitch was omitted from much of the data used in making this analysis, pitch is not indicated throughout the rest of the grammar. (Braine 1970:29)
Pitch, intonation, or phonation, are not discussed further here as it appears that they do not distinguish lexical items; the emphasis is on segmental, syllable, and word phonology. However, quantity is phonologically relevant: main syllables of lexical roots have longer nuclei (and somewhat higher pitch) than other syllables, additionally length is contrastive in these nuclei. Nasalization is also contrastive among stressed nuclei. Note that in Braine’s (1963) stressed nuclei are marked with a colon (:) while in her (1970) these they are marked with a acute (ˊ).
11 The copy of the ms. given to me by Norman Zide is undated but it is noted as 1963 in Huffman’s (1986) bibliography.
2.1.2 Car segments
Car segments are tabled below. Note that here and elsewhere the terms vowel and consonant are only used in reference to the graphemes used in the orthographic data; segmental values are referred to as either vocoid or contoid, and are characterized in terms of their phonotactic positions (onset, coda, nuclei etc.).
Onsets / p t c k ʔ m n ɲ ŋ v l dr ɽ j f s h /